The term Avant-garde is derived from the French, and, more precisely, it comes from the military sector; the literal meaning of this word is “advance guard.” However, besides its utilization in the military field, avant-garde in the World of Arts refers to different literature styles, such as Dadaism, Merz-Poetry, and Expressionism.

The avant-garde artists and the genres they represent obtain their artistic and aesthetic expression and inspiration from metropolitan life and its influence on perception and experience, whether positive or negative.

Another influence on avant-garde artists can be seen in media production, including leaflets, advertisements, and artistic illumination, which refer to simultaneity and the shock experience.

Avant-garde literature belongs in the modern literature frame. It observes language critically since it examines the artificiality of reality, that reality, the language the user perceives, which means the fictiveness of language and its usage. Also, it questions the subject and how it views the artistic product. In the creative execution, it is realized through collage and assemblage.

Now, considering that language is a mediator between the I and the world and how language influences our thinking, it becomes clear how much humans depend on language. But precisely, this realization of the deficiency of expression and source enhances the literary production.

One example, therefore, is Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter from 1902. In this letter, Hofmannthal displays the shattering and improper use of the language.

He gives four examples of how literary production procedures via language. First, it doubts the words’ boundness to truth and the independence of language. Second, language artifices and lampoons speech, as language is art itself and has language as its tool. Third, language denies its understandability through obfuscation of the statement, and fourth, it distorts the context to express the insight of the decomposed experienced modern reality.

Here are two excerpts from Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter; I also provide the link to the complete letter at the end of the post.

I wanted to show that the fables and mythic tales which the ancients have handed down to us and in which painters and sculptors never cease to find mindless pleasure are the hieroglyphics of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom. I sometimes thought I felt its breath, as though coming from behind a veil.

The mental world did not seem to me to be opposed to the physical, likewise the courtly and the bestial, art and barbarism, solitude and society. I felt nature in all of it, in the aberrations of insanity just as much as in the most refined subtleties of a Spanish ceremonial, in the crudities of young peasants no less than in the loveliest allegory.

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The link to the complete Lord Chandos Letter:

Click to access Hofmannsthal-Chandos-Letter-1f0z8ts.pdf